The Adventures of Hlapić in Burgenland Croatian

The paper presents the results of a digital comparative text analysis of the Croatian original and the Burgenland editions of a children’s classic performed in combination with research methods of Translation Studies. The Croatian children’s novel of 1913, Čudnovate zgode šegrta Hlapića [The Strange Adventures of Hlapić the Apprentice] by Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić (1874–1938), appeared in Burgenland Croatian in 1960 and again, with minor alterations, in 2000. Burgenland Croatian is the language of the Croatian minority predominantly positioned in Austria, considered to be a regional variant of Croatian. These two languages are similar, but they still differ in structural and semantic elements as they have been separately developing since the 15th century. The similarities allowed for a digital comparative text analysis of the linguistic aspects of source and target texts, including their linguistic complexity. The results of the digital analysis demonstrate the applicability of digital linguistics methodology in analyzing translated and rewritten literary texts when source and target language idioms are similar, especially in determining the stylistic differences between source and target texts. The results of the analysis of culture-specific items rendered in two target texts, as compared to the original, indicate there exist not many differences on the language text levels between the analyzed source and target texts, yet some discrepancies between the two editions of the translation into the Burgenland Croatian have been detected, and thus explained in the historical and cultural context of their appearance